After defecting from the Festival for a day to attend a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival and a performance of an exiled theater troupe from Belarus that should have been part of the World Voices Festival [see boxes], I rode the Madison Ave. bus to the French Embassy’s Cultural Services department for the “Authors and Audiences” panel. On the panel were Bookforum editor and panel moderator Albert Mobilio, Spanish novelist Manuel de Lope, Israeli novelist and screenwriter Yael Hedaya, Israeli novelist and translator Asaf Schurr, French novelist Laurence Cosse, and Irish novelist and screenwriter Irvine Welsh. The empty chair at the beginning of this panel did not symbolize an imprisoned writer or even Mario Bellatin, who could not attend for other reasons, but was...
Maybe it’s the location—the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, next to the Hudson River—and maybe it’s the fact that many predict global conflicts over scarce water resources to dwarf conflicts over oil in future decades, but water served as the theme of the Opening Night reading at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival. Much about this event was new—the downtown venue, the Stand-Up Critics who introduced their recommended books in five categories (contemporary novel, classic novel, translated work, small press title, and a surprise) before the main event, and the energetic new Festival Director Laszlo Jakob Orsas who greeted the capacity crowd.
When the Stand-Up Critics arrived to a stage containing only one podium I feared another Festival feature—the empty chair that symbolizes writers unable...
Opening Night for this festival used to be at Town Hall, which was cavernous and felt too big for something as intimate as literature. Last night it took place at The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, overlooking the coast of New Jersey and the Hudson river, which was very nice. The evening's theme, as far as I could tell, had to do with water, and that had something to do with freedom, though it is unclear to me exactly why. The concept was "Written on Water". I'm not sure I understand what this means. To me, whatever you write on water will disappear as you are writing it, and literature is quite the opposite, the only thing that remains of those who practice it. They turn...
The PEN World Voices Festival had already begun, as director Laszlo Jakab Orsos observed, with a lecture on the role of the public intellectual. By the time the opening night started at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, a literary celebration was already well underway.
The re-centering of this year's festival towards the High Line means a lot of hoofing it, so prepare yourself for some long walks, with ample rewards: skyline views, sights of ferries crossing the Hudson River, and the nautical oddity that I will never really get tired of, the tugboat.
Opening Night abounded with stars, from Wallace Shawn to Malcolm Gladwell, and superstars that you may not be aware of, such as Belgian writer Amelie Nothomb, who publishes a...
Thursday evening PEN World Voices spread out. As I sat in the front section of the Morgan Library auditorium, I knew there were whirlwinds of words circling over Manhattan and at least one other borough.
When you write a book, says Francine Prose, and you get a review, there's always that second or third paragraph where they give the plot summary. And you read it and say, How did anyone ever think this is what the book was about? So when a movie is made from your novel, it's like seeing that paragraph blown up really big.
There are five novelists on the stage, all with experience of having books turned into films.
When I wrote the book that became "Betty Blue," says Philippe Djian, I wanted to write about a kid who scribbles away in his corner, who fills notebook after notebook wityh his writing, and who feels no need to take it any further. Writing is enough for him. But...
So it's in a little room at the Maison Française, off Washington Square, well-attended. well-lit, video-recorded, photographed, remembered perhaps, blogged about certainly.
Djian is the guy in the black leather jacket with the three-day beard. The woman on his arm, it develops, is his interpreter. With them is A.M. Homes who will moderate/interview/jolly things along.
Not much is happening. Clearly we have a provocateur at the dais, but the fur is refusing to fly. The mechanics of the session are interesting. First A. M. Homes asks a question, but invariably someone starts to talk before she has made her point. The interpreter. She's translating into Philippe Djian's ear. Then Djian answers, elaborates, wings off on a tangential tack, loops back around, falls silent. Now it's the interpreter's...
A settlement has been reached today in the case Wiwa v Royal Dutch Shell. The amount has been announced as $15.5 million. The plaintiffs have stated that the possibility of appeals could have dragged the case on for much longer. $5 million of the funds will be held in trust to rebuild the devastated Ogoni community in the Niger delta region of Nigeria. Rights groups are hailing the settlement as a victory for the cause of human rights.
The PEN American Center was deeply involved in advocacy for Ken Saro-Wiwa's cause.
She appeared at three events. Wearing a brightly colored dress and beautiful silver hair, she would raise her hand. Each time she would ask a difficult, penetrating question in a spritely, musical voice that challenged an author on a PEN World Voices Panel. This time about the role of government, that time about writing and dreams. She always carried herself with dignity and smiled warmly at her neighbors. I kept wondering to myself, who is this woman?
I soon found out at the Freedom to Write Lecture at NYU's Cooper Union. For she was stepping onto the stage with the Ghanaian Kwame Anthony Appiah, President of PEN America and professor at Princeton. The woman was Nawal El Saadawi.
WRITERS AND POLITICS AT PEN WORLD VOICES
Featuring Nadeem Aslam, Norbert Gstrein, Mariken Jongman, Khet Mar, Domenico Starnone, and Larry Siems.
With politicians becoming writers (Obama, Nixon), and writers becoming politicians (Mario Vargas Llosa, Vaclav Havel, Shashi Tharoor), is it possible to draw a line between politics and literature, and declare that one should never include the other?
Art as neutral to and indifferent to and above politics: it is an appealing self-deception, a bit more prevalent in the West, with writers whose professed stance, “I am not my brother’s keeper; I’m an artist, and that is all I am” seemingly carries this subtext: "I’ve got to look out for Number One,...
This panel was billed as a discussion about the discovery of 'unbearable truths', as mediated through the milieu of the former German Democratic Republic. It was much more about poetry, and that was fine with me.
Poetry is Better than Prose
The earlier panel Left/Right Literature uttered the profound question of whether literature is capable of truly reflecting the horror of war. The Austrian author Gstrein observed that novels often fall short of communicating war, because it is always more horrible than words can express. Combined with this is the fact that novels often present thematic linkages of characters and events that do not necessarily happen in real war. Rather, war is disjointed and unpredictable. So what could capture such an elusive...
A Spanish philosopher, a French graphic novelist, and an Iraqi performance artist meet in a bar...
Any number of amusing scenarios could have emerged from the illuminating panel, "Quiet Revolutions in Storytelling" at the PEN World Voices Festival. Three seemingly unrelated creators engaged in a lively discussion about revolution and technology. Not only was there a lack of slapstick antics that could make for jokes, there was a loose concurrence of opinion and broader confluence of bristling ideas. Sameer Padania of the human rights organization Witness.org moderated.
Trigger Happy
But I speak vaguely. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi artist and professor who is perhaps best known for his project 'Shoot an Iraqi.' Bilal lost a brother in Iraq to an air-to-surface...
We do not like to talk about prison. We look the other way when we drive by the barbed wire, change the subject to something brighter (something more 'free'), or mutter a thanks to the system when certain kinds of criminals are incarcerated (the 'bad' kind).
Do not be alarmed: we are meant to fear prisons. They are supposed to serve as a deterrent against breaking the law. They are also meant to punish criminals, or restore them, and the state has taken full responsibility for accomplishing these aims. Right?
But it's more complicated. Some people are imprisoned for their political beliefs, others for crimes precipitated by structural inequalities, and some entirely by accident. Suddenly we're...
The festival has begun. But my contributions begin tomorrow. My beat will be human rights and fiction, and anything else that reveals itself in these action packed days. I will be double-posting at www.fictionthatmatters.org. Looking forward to joining you all...
Xiaolu Guo's linguistic marriage of two tongues and their temperaments corresponds, in her novel, to the mating of a British man and a Chinese woman. Her book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, might be called mongrel, but is it promiscuous in the Johnsonian sense? Maybe not. Eventually, her lovers part, after Z. has an abortion and after her application for an extension of her visa to stay in England is denied by the Chinese government. This was never to be a sunnily post-romantic, twenty-first-century tale of girl-meets-boy, nor a serene account of language-meets-language. Instead, the mergers are difficult, fractious, violent, incomplete, short-term, as notable for their conflicts and contradictions as for anything shared harmoniously in common.
Esta es la historia o la ficción de un evento singular. En el auditorio de la YMCA de la calle 92 de Nueva York (Y92, como dicen los neoyorquinos), se reencontraron Salman Rushdie, Humberto Eco y Mario Vargas Llosa, los “tres mosqueteros”, según...
De camino para escuchar las Voces del Mundo, en el Festival de Literatura Internacional, organizado por PEN en la ciudad de Nueva York, en la esquina de la 2da. Avenida y la calle 49 Este, allí en la calle, un hombre decidido, me da un papel que afirma “la empresa de construcción Rovini explota a trabajadores inmigrantes, de la minorías, sin preocuparse de su seguridad física, de su salud y de un sustento mínimo…” Pretendo desentenderme para concentrarme en las lecturas de Europa y México que me han asignado cubrir, impartidas por cinco autores de renombre mundial , acompañados de una silla vacía símbolo...
Last night I wanted to be Hungarian. When Péter Esterházy took the podium at Town Hall for PEN World Voices “Public Lives/Private Lives” along side fellow literary giants Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, A.B. Yehoshua, Carol Bracho, Rian Malan, Evelyn Schlag, Ian McEwan, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie, he began by saying, “I don’t speak English, I speak Hungarian. You speak English, you don’t speak Hungarian. This is the problem.” Then he carefully removed his reading glasses from his pocket, and put them on, telling us, “I see either you or the text. This is the problem.” I laughed, my own reading glasses perched on the tip of my nose as I took notes in the semi-dark.
(The event was an evening of short, literary films. It was held Tuesday, April 29 at 6 pm at the Goethe Institut in New York and referred to as: The Rattapallax/PEN World Voices Literary Film Feast)
“It has always seemed to me a rare privilege this, of being an American,” Gertrude Stein wrote in her sweeping, beguiling epic, written in the 1920’s: “The Making of Americans” , “...a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realise our parents. remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.” In “The Making of Americans”, Gertrude Stein also brought an odd and singular rhythm to these sentences and the ones that followed...
